Women’s Building will become temporary performance art venue

Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson will preside over the three-day run of “Romantic Songs of the Patriarchy” at the Women’s Building in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Photo: Quinn Gravier / Special to The Chronicle

Art lover and aficionado Carla Emil, whose collection (with husband Rich Silverstein) is the basis of the SFMOMA exhibition “Selves and Others,” has founded C Project, a foundation that describes itself as dedicated to bringing “original performance-based art experiences to San Francisco.”

The first such “experience,” at the Women’s Building in the Mission District from Nov. 9 to 11, is by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson — whose “The Visitors” installation was such a hit last summer at SFMOMA — and is curated by Tom Eccles.

Kjartansson will be here to preside over the three-day run of “Romantic Songs of the Patriarchy,” in which musicians will perform love songs that seem to be innocuous but when listened to closely reveal “complex and often more disturbing attitudes toward women.”

About a year ago, after a work was commissioned, the artist came to San Francisco. Emil took him to 14 sites, including the Women’s Building and Fort Mason, Minnesota Street, Grace Cathedral, Palace of Fine Arts, Armory, Nourse Auditorium, the Green Room in the Veterans Building and the Victoria Theater, hoping he would be inspired. “Some were traditional venues where art installations and performances typically occur,” said Emil. “And some were less expected, like the Women’s Building.”

“We wandered around for a while,” said Emil, “and the minute we left, on the sidewalk right in front of the building, Ragnar threw out the idea that has become this project.” Through the summer, several other projects were considered, “but this was the one that really stayed with all of us involved,” said Emil.

The artist was not only attracted to the building, which has many different rooms and different kinds of spaces, nooks and crannies that will provide venues for musicians, said Emil, but was also moved to realize the breadth of what’s under the Women’s Building roof: services, classes, administration of nonprofits, conferences and events.

Although his interest in the site signifies serious respect, she emphasized that the work “will still have a sense of humor and irony, albeit mixed with pathos and beauty, the signature characteristics of so much of Ragnar’s work. We want people to have fun, be entertained, and leave with a sense of joy.”

Attendance will be free, but timed tickets, to be distributed in advance, will be necessary for entrance. (Two other Kjartansson works will be on view at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts from May 25 to Sept. 1.)

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Profound question to consider, just after you finish pondering the sound of one hand clapping or whether it was the chicken or the egg that came first: Do one-way street designations apply to users of bike lanes?

Leah Garchik washed up on the shores of Fifth and Mission in 1972, began her duties as a part-time temporary steno clerk, and ascended the journalistic ladder. Over the years, she has served as writer, reviewer, editor and columnist. She is the author of two books, “San Francisco: Its Sights and Secrets” and “Real Life Romance."

She is an avid knitter, a terrible accordion player, a sporadic tweeter and a pretty good speller.